Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1887-05-06

religious newspapers They lie on your center
table to curse your children and blast with
their Internal fires generations unborn. You
find these books in the desk of the school
miss in the trunk of the young man, in the
steamboat cabin. on the table of the hotel
reception room. You see a light in your
child's room late at night. You suddenly go
in and say: "What are you doingg II am
reading" "What are you reading?" "a
book" You look at the book; it is a bad
book. "Where did you get it? Il bor-
rowed it.n Alas, there are always those
abroad who would like to loan your son or
daughter bad book. Everywhere, every
where an unclean literature. | charge upon
it the destruction of 10000 immortal souls,
and bid you this morning wake up to the
magnitude of the theme. / shall take all the
worlds literature good novels and bad,
travels true and false, histories faithful and
incorrect, legends beautiful and monstrous,
81 tracts, all chronicles, all epilosues, all
fanSily, city, state and national libraries
pie them up in pyramid of literature and
then II snail bring to bear upon it some grand,
glorious, infallible, unmistakable Christian
principles. God help me to speak with refer
ence to my last account and God help you to
listen.
I charge you, in the first place, to stand
aloof from all books that give false pictures
of human life. Life is neither tragedy nor
a farce. Men are not all either knaves or
heroes. Women are neither angels nor furles
And yet, if you depended upon much OF the
literature of the day you would get the idea
that life, instead of being something earnest,
something practical, is fitful and fantas-
tic and extravagant thing. How poorly
prepared are that young man and woman
for the duties of to-day who spent last night
wading through brilliant passages descriptive
of magnificent knavery and wickedness! The
man will be looking all day long for his hero
inc in the tin shop, by the forge, in the
factory, in the counting room. and he will not
find her, and he will be dissatisfied. A man
who gives himself up to the indiscriminate
reading Of novels will be nerveless, inane and
a nuisance. He will be fit neither for the
store, nor the shop, nor the field. A woman
who gives herself up to the indiscriminate
reading of novels will be untitled for the
duties of wife, mother, sister, daughter. There
she is, hair dishevelled, countenance vacant,
cheeks pale, hands trembling, bursting into
tears at midnight over the fate OF some I'M
fortunate lover; in the day time, when she
ought to be busy, staring by the half
hour at nothing, biting her finger nails
into the quick. The carpet, that was plain
before. will be palmer after having wandered
through a romance all night long in tessel-
ated halls of castles. And your industrious
companion will be more unattfactive than
ever now that you have walked in the ro-
nance through parks with plumed princesses
or lounged in the arbor with the polished DIES
perado. Oh, these confirmed novel readers!
They are untitled for this life, which IS
tremendous discipline. They know not how
to 90 through the furnaces of trial through
which they must pass, and they are untitled
for a world where everything we gain we
achieve by hard, long continuing and ex-
haustive work.
Again; Abstain from all those books
which, while they have some good things
about them, have also an admixture OF evil
You have read books that had two elements
in them-the good and the bad. Which stuck
TO you? The bad! The heart of most people
is like a sieve, which let's the small particles
of gold fall through, but keeps the great
cindefs. Once in while there is mind like
a loadstone, which, plunged amid steel and
brass filings, gathers up the steel and repels
the brass. But it is generally just the oppo-
site If you attempt to plunge through
hedge of burrs to get one blackberry, you
will get more bufrs than blackberries. You
cannot afford to read bad book, how
ever good you are. You say: 'The influence
is Insignificant" I tell you that the scratch
of q pin has sometimes produced the lockjaw
Alas. if through curiosity, as many do, you
pry into an evil book, your curiosity is as
dangerous as that of the man who would take
a torch into gunpowder mill merely to see
whether it would really blow UP OF not. In
a menagerie in Ney York man put his arm
through the bars of a black leopard's cage.
The animals hide looked SO sleek, and bright,
and beautiful. He just streked it once. The
monster seized him, and he drew forth hand
torn, and maRgled, and bleeding. Oh, touch
not evil, even with the falntest stroke!
Though it may be glossy and beautiful, touch
it not, lest you pull forth your soul torn and
bleeding under the clutch OF the black
leopard ''But," you say, "how can find
out whether book is good or bad without
reading itp' There is always something sus-
picious about bad book. never knew an
xception-sonaething suspicious III phe index
or style of illustration. This venomous rep
tile almost always carries warning rattle.
Again: charge you to stand OIL from all
those books which corrupt the imagination
and infame the passions L do not refer now
to that kind of book which the villain has
under his coat waiting for the school to get
out and then, looking both ways to see that
there is no policeman around the block,
offers the book to your son on his way home
I do not speak of that kind OF literature, but
that which evades the law and comes opb in
polished style, and with acute ple5 sounds the
tocsin that rouses up all the baser passions of
RI. tl,or cfJ{.I - Ia 10
land, there is fetid, reezing. ullwashed itera-
ture enough to poison all tine fountains of
public virtue and smite your sons and daugh-
ters as with the wing Of q destroying angel,
and it is time that the ministers of the Gospel
Righteousness. all armed to the teeth, in this
great battle againsta depraved literature.
Again, abstain from those books which are
apologetic of crime 1t is sad thing that
some of the best and most beautiful book
bindery, an1 some of the finest rhetoric, have
been brought to make sin attractive. Vice is
a. horrible thing, anyhow. 1t is born in
sinsmee<and it dies bowling in the darkness.
liz t.hdis world it is scourged with whip of
scorpions, but afterward the thunders of
Gods wrath pursue it across a boundless
desert, beating it with ruin and woe. When
YOU come TO plluU CtIIdliGy, uO uob pdulU IL
as looking from behind embroidered curtains
or through lattice of royal seraglio, but as
writhing in the agonies of city hospital.
Cursed be the books that try to make i'm
purity DESCENT and crime attractive and
hypocrisy noble. Cursed be the books that
swarm with libertines and desperadoes, who
make the brain of the young people whirl
with villainy. Ye authors who write them,
We publishers who print them, ye booksellers
who distribute them shall be cut to pieces, If
not by an aroused community, then at last by
the hail of Divine vengeance, which shall
sweep to the lowest pit of perdition all
We murderers of souls 1 tell you, though
YOU may escape in this world, you will
be ground at last under the hoof of eternal
calamities, and you will be chained to the
rock, and you will have the vultures of des'
pair clawing at your soul, and those whom
you have destroyed will come around to tor
ment you, and to pour hotter Goals of fury
upon your head, and rejoice eternasly in tht
outcry of your pain and the howl of YOU
damnation. "God shall wound the hairy
scalp of him that goeth on in his trespasses.
The clock strikes midnight. "A fair form
bends over g. romance. The eyes flash fire
The breath is quick and irregular. Occa
sionally the color flashes to the cheek, an(
then dies out. The hands 1sremble as though
guardian spirit were laying to shake The
deadly book out of thu grasp. Hot tears fall